Giuliani to return to Manhattan for 9/11 anniversary

News-Times, The (Danbury, CT)

Published
8:00 pm EDT, Monday, August 27, 2007

Bloomberg said in a radio interview that he had spoken with Giuliani a day earlier and that the former mayor and 2008 presidential candidate would be one of the dignitaries to participate in this year's roll call of the nearly 3,000 names.

The somber reading has been the centerpiece of the annual ceremony since the 2001 attack and has become a tradition for thousands of people who lost loved ones. Giuliani was the first reader at the first anniversary in 2002.

Bloomberg and Giuliani were on opposite sides of a disagreement weeks ago about where the ceremony would be held this year. Some relatives of victims were angered when the city decided to move the event from the west border of the 16-acre trade center site to a plaza off the southeast corner because of the construction at the site.

Giuliani, on the campaign trail, said he sympathized with them and was saddened it would not be held in its usual place. A national figure whose notoriety is linked to his handling of the attack, he said he had great emotional attachment to the site itself.

"I feel very bad that it's going to be moved," he said last month.

Bloomberg and the families worked out a compromise that still keeps the reading of the names in the new location but gives loved ones some minimal access to the bedrock at the bottom of the seven-story pit that once was the trade center's basement. Many mourners feel as though that area is a gravesite and say they need to touch the ground to feel connected.

Reading aloud all the names of the lost can take more than three hours. The reading pauses for moments of silence for the times that the two planes hit and the towers collapsed.

In past years, between 100 and 200 people have helped read out the roll call.

Bloomberg and Giuliani will be two of several dignitaries to read names. New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, New Jersey Gov. John Corzine and Spitzer's predecessor, Gov. George Pataki, were also invited, Bloomberg said.

The rest of the readers will be firefighters, police officers and other rescue workers.